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Adrian native turns $500 house into writing career

Drew Philp always wanted to write. But growing in the rural blue-collar town of Adrian, the son of a machinist father and English teacher mother, he says it never even crossed his mind that he could actually do it for a living.

Adrian native turns $500 house into writing career

Drew Philp always wanted to write. But growing in the rural blue-collar town of Adrian, the son of a machinist father and English teacher mother, he says it never even crossed his mind that he could actually do it for a living.

“I didn’t know any professional writers,” says Philp, 30. “It’s not like it wasn’t on the menu. I wasn’t even in the same restaurant.”

Today Philp is preparing for the debut of his first book, “A $500 House: Rebuilding an Abandoned Home and an American City,” with a release party Friday at Trinosophes in Detroit

The book expands on an essay he wrote for Buzzfeed.com in 2014, which detailed his experience of moving to Detroit and buying an abandoned house in Poletown for $500 at auction.

Like the essay, the book delves into the city’s complex history and current issues, his assimilation into a mostly black neighborhood, and how he built his home by hand after removing about 10,000 pounds of trash, including a chopped-up minivan, with just a pitchfork and snow shovel.

Philp learned about journalism in college at the University of Michigan’s student paper, the Michigan Daily. “They literally taught me how to write,” he says. “I had no idea what I was doing.”

As a student he was also concerned about the state of the world and specifically Michigan, including race relations. So as he saw many of his peers leaving the state, he decided to stay. “I thought Michigan needed people with an education more than anything.”

In fact, he moved to Detroit before graduating. He commuted while working as the lone white guy at an all-black construction company and living in an apartment with no kitchen sink. It was late 2007 or early 2008. As he recalls: “There were still trees growing out of the Book Cadillac.”

"A $500 House in Detroit," by Drew Philp.(Photo: Scribner)

Now, sharing his mostly complete Queen Anne-style home with his rescue mutt, Gratiot, Philp is making a living as a writer.

QUESTION: Buzzfeed kind of made you famous.

ANSWER: That essay did make my name. It went incredibly viral. There’s almost two million views. … The average time spent on the article was about the length of a television show. So I was really happy to capture people for a length of a sitcom.

Q: How did friends and family say about your move to Detroit?

A: People thought I was nuts. (They) thought I was throwing my life away. … At the time, the only narrative was that … Detroit is this awful hellhole, and what I found was that was not true. … The people who had stayed here were some of the most wonderful people I’d ever met in the world.

Q: What was it like when you moved to your neighborhood?

A: I wasn't sure how I’d be accepted as a white person in a neighborhood that was largely black. I found that people don’t want revenge. They want equality. They saw me working on the house every day, doing it myself and not hiring contractors or getting any grants. … I think I earned respect, and I love my neighbors.

Q: What have you learned from living there?

A: People have a different relationship with their neighbors here. Other places I’ve lived people don’t say hello to each other in the elevator. People stop by to see how I’m doing. We do barbecues. I’ll fix stuff for them. … There’s kind of radical neighborliness that exists in Detroit that I think is rare.

I know all my neighbors for blocks around, and everybody knows me. We help each other out.

Q: Do you have a favorite part of the house or story behind the restoration?

A: There’s a beam we put up that was taken out of an abandoned factory, a pile of rubble just a couple blocks north of my house that honestly looked like the bombing of Dresden. … A couple of friends and I went there, cut out a part of the beam and put it up in my house. Now it holds my whole house up. It also represents a kind of piece of Detroit's history that has been salvaged and kind of from the ruins.

Q: What do you think about the current revival downtown?

A: (In the book) I talk about Detroit being the most segregated metro area in the United States. To some degree I think segregation is moving back to the city as well. … People are thinking about how to overcome these things. We don’t have a lot of precedent on how to do that because we’ve got walls separating white and black American in Detroit. Literal brick walls, so that’s going to take some time. But I am hopeful.

Q: Any advice for someone who wants to buy a cheap house in Detroit?

A: If you’re coming with honest intentions, to grow your family and make a living, that’s wonderful. If you want to buy an abandoned house next to me and let it sit for 10 years, I’d be pretty pissed. ... You don’t want to make decisions that affect my life and not be around to see the consequences.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: My agent and I are pitching another book. I would like to turn this book into a film. We’re thinking about that. I’m interested in all kinds of stuff. Journalism is what I’m focused on.